March 08, 2007

Today, March 8, is the 150th anniversary of a protest by garment and textile workers in New York City. Those workers, as you might guess from their jobs, were women. Bad working conditions, a euphemism for the reality of their Dickensian factories - and appallingly low wages - pushed these previously powerless women into the streets.

The cops acted for the plutocrats and their legislative puppets, attacking the protesters and forcing them off the public thoroughfare in a fine example of the bloody reality which so often has accompanied the ideals enshrined in our nation‘s great documents, but has been frequently ignored by state authority right up to the present day.

December 15, 2006

I’ll not apologize for the smile brought to my lips by Augusto Pinochet’s death this week. He deserved a trial, but, obviously, his protectors were going to make sure he never got one, So, adiós sin compasión to the beast. His final hours were a good deal more comfortable than those of his thousands of victims. If I could afford the flight, I’d shit on his grave ... except that his family took his ashes home to their ranch to avoid such acts of desecration.

My grim glee has been tempered because another mass murderer enabled by U.S. machinations and complicity and money, a man still very much alive, may Pinochet himself out of the grasp of justice. His name is José Efraín Ríos Montt, retired general and president of Guatemala, graduate of the notorious School of the Americas, and right-wing evangelical Christian who counts Pat Robertson as a personal friend. In the 18 months he headed the country after a CIA-backed coup d’etat in 1982, Ríos Montt presided over at least five times as many killings as Pinochet, and, with other generals, rained terror onto hundreds of Mayan villages and towns. Ronald Reagan, the sainted Republican icon, helped him do it and publicly defended him for getting a “bum rap” at the same time Ríos Montt’s soldiers were tying people’s thumbs behind their backs, shooting them in the head and dumping them in mass graves across the Guatemalan highlands and elsewhere. All in the name of crushing a communist guerrilla insurgency that arose because U.S. ideologues couldn’t stand to see democracy in Guatemala.

Today, Ríos Montt has it much better than Pinochet in his final years. He roams free as head of one of the country’s largest political parties, the Guatemalan Republican Front, and came in third in the 2003 presidential election. The good news is that he might not be free that much longer.

December 09, 2006

I don’t know anything about the psychology of numbers. Specifically, the magnetism round numbers seem to have for us, specifically round numbers ending in zeroes. It’s an attraction that can’t be denied. Such a number is closing in on us right now. It could arrive before the New Year. A number that will receive – no matter how transient and meaningless it actually is – extensive blog and megamedia attention. 3000. The horrible tally of U.S. troops dead in Iraq.

Let me tell you about two young men. Their résumés are short. They died young.

Lance Corporal Darwin Judge

Darwin Judge was a recently deployed 19-year-old when he was killed. Born and raised in Marshalltown, Iowa, he was active in his church and Boy Scouts, pitched for his All-Star team in Little League games, got his first newspaper route at age 8. At 16, he went to work at a grocer’s. Summers he baled hay. He loved riding his motorcycle and woodworking, at which he excelled. He made a grandfather clock for his mother. He signed up for the Marines his senior year in high school, completed basic training after graduating and was shipped overseas. Two weeks after being assigned to his detachment he was killed.

Corporal Charles McMahon

Charles McMahon was not quite 22 when he was killed. He grew up in Woburn, Massachusetts. As a kid he earned pocket money mowing lawns and delivering papers. He and a good friend practically lived at the local Boys Club, shooting pool, playing ping pong, but most of all learning how to swim and dive. McMahon spent so much time swimming that when he was old enough, the club hired him to teach other kids. It’s said he was good with them. The club’s director, a former Marine, drew McMahon’s avid attention with his stories of the Corps. At 19, McMahon joined, assigned at first to the Military Police. After a year and a half, he signed up for a special course of intense security training. Two weeks after being assigned to his detachment, he was killed.

November 20, 2006

With the "bipartisan" Baker Commission trolling for a solution to the Iraqmire, the White House running a separate review of the situation, and the Pentagon trying to figure out what to do next, one cannot help but wonder whether the main thrust of current American policy in Iraq is launching as many lead balloons as possible before the 110th Congress is sworn in.

Thomas Ricks's piece in today's Washington Post discussing the Pentagon's Iraq policy review provides an amazing read, if you can stop laughing through your tears. There's enough fodder there to get Ricks started on the sequel to Fiasco.

The Pentagon apparently is secretly working on three possible approaches in Iraq, which Ricks says insiders have labeled Go Big, Go Long, Go Home. Short for send more troops, reduce troop levels but stay longer, or withdraw.

November 05, 2006

When choosing who among the neo-conservative imperialists has most completely adopted the politics of Darth Vader, Michael Ledeen surely must rank near the top. Among those without a sense of history, Ledeen is probably best known for his columns at National Review Online in which he repeats his signature “Faster, please” regarding what he believes is the sine qua non of the “war on terror,” regime change in Tehran brought about by intensive and extensive U.S. assistance to internal and exiled Iranian resistance groups.

In the late 1970s, Ledeen had connections to ultra-rightists in the Italian intelligence services (SISMI) at a time when neo-fascists were engaged in what amounted to a terrorist war in Italy.

In the 1980s, he was a go-between for dealings between the Reagan Administration and Iran arms dealer Manucher Ghorbanifar in what would come to be known as the Iran-contra affair.

November 04, 2006

After nearly six years of greed and plunder, we've almost become inured to Republican corruption, whether some new aspect of the many tentacled Abramoff scandal - which continues to lasso GOP Congressmen in its web of payoffs and other unconscionable behavior like the truly rancid Marianas affair - or some other rip-off or influence-peddling.

We've almost gotten used to the cowardly practice for which the campaign against Max Cleland was the prototype, the upsidedownism of some Republican't chickenhawk calling into question the patriotism of a Democratic candidate who served in uniform. We're hardly surprised when the attack dogs try out some new version of the Willie Horton ploy, using coded or sometimes less veiled racism to appeal to the knuckle-draggers among our fellow citizens.

And we barely flinch any more when some new revelation appears that policies Mister Bush and his mentors and minions have crafted have been tantamount to printing up 10 million al Qaeda recruiting posters and slapping them up all over the Muslim world.

October 25, 2006

A few days ago, in his column Barney and Baghdad, Thomas Friedman compared Iraq's bloody October with the 1968 Tet offensive in Vietnam. There was follow-up from Tony Snow and Mister Bush. Tet's shock to middle America's psyche, Washington's propagandists and the U.S. military arguably affected the country in a way not seen since Custer left his presidential ambitions leaking into the dust of Medicine Tail Coulee. Although another 34,000 Americans and 2-3 million Southeast Asians would die first, Tet ultimately led to the withdrawal of U.S. troops and a defeat that still divides the nation.

Out of this came the "Vietnam Syndrome," and an American version of Germany's post-World War I stab-in-the-back theory - that is, traitors in the media and the streets caused the U.S. to lose a war that could easily have been won with a different, more aggressive strategy. Tet, they argued, had been a military disaster for Hanoi and the National Liberation Front, the latter being permanently crippled. But the naive and treasonous on the homefront had allowed them to win the propaganda battle, which had been General Giap's and the NLF's real objective all along. In other words, in the parlance of the time, radical-liberals wimped out, forcing what amounted to an uncalled-for surrender. About the time this myth was being crafted, nascent neo-conservatives began their plans to ensure this never happened again.

October 24, 2006

I'm only a sometimes fan of Nicholas Kristof, and like many of his columns, today's number is a partial winner. It's behind the NYTfirewall:

For every additional second we stay in Iraq, we taxpayers will end up paying an additional $6,300.

So aside from the rising body counts and all the other good reasons to adopt a timetable for withdrawal from Iraq, here's another: We are spending vast sums there that would be better spent rescuing the American health care system, developing alternative forms of energy and making a serious effort to reduce global poverty.

In the run-up to the Iraq war, Donald Rumsfeld estimated that the overall cost would be under $50 billion. Paul Wolfowitz argued that Iraq could use its oil to "finance its own reconstruction."

But now several careful studies have attempted to tote up various costs, and they suggest that the tab will be more than $1 trillion -- perhaps more than $2 trillion. The higher sum would amount to $6,600 per American man, woman and child.

{snip}

Just to put that $2 trillion in perspective, it is four times the additional cost needed to provide health insurance for all uninsured Americans for the next decade. It is 1,600 times Mr. Bush's financing for his vaunted hydrogen energy project.

October 13, 2006

The Johns Hopkins Iraq mortality study published in the Lancet has, as was expected three seconds after it was announced, stirred the rightwing to argue against there being a bloodbath in Iraq, or at least, if there is one, it’s far smaller than the researchers claim, and besides, Saddam was worse. Fortunately, there are some good discussions examining the naysayers’ claims, as well as Lancet’s.

At Deltoid, Tim Lambert, who did an exquisite job of debunking objections when the previous Iraq mortality study was published in Lancet two years ago, is on the job again, dicing several bits of nonsense:

Yes, the media hasn't reported that many deaths in Iraq. But they don't have reporters every or even most places, so it's certain that most deaths go unreported in the media.

Jay Redding offers

If the death toll were really that high, there would be massive refugee outflows from Iraq. We're seeing some of that, but nowhere near as much as those figures would suggest. Furthermore, the same group predicted 100,000 dead in the first year of the war (releasing their figures near the 2004 elections, again for political gain) -- now they want to argue that an addition 550,000 have died in the subsequent two years? That argument doesn't even pass the smell test.

Well, there has been massive refugee outflow And they do argue that the death rate has gone way up since the first study. But this increase seems well supported by all other indicators of violence in Iraq.

September 28, 2006

It is said that Osama bin Laden was surprised but gleeful upon learning that his hand-picked hijackers had done more than expected and toppled the twin towers of the World Trade Center. But the devastation of that attack five years ago caused minuscule damage compared with the dirty bomb that the Senate and House have exploded in our midst this week. The rule of law is contaminated. In the clash of civilizations, civilization took another hit.

If al Qaeda held five seats in the U.S. Senate, does anyone doubt that there would be five more ayes today to approve the Dungeons and Rendition Act? It wasn’t, however, al Qaeda that voted for torture and against habeas corpus. This was the act of men and women who swore an oath to the Constitution they have now chosen to eviscerate. Not all at once, mind you, rather death by a thousand cuts.

About an hour ago, I got off the phone with my stepson. He confirmed for me what my wife and I have known was coming for months. He has chosen after five years in America to move to England. His mother, who didn’t see or talk to him or his sister for 15 years because their father had kidnapped them to Libya, is obviously much saddened by this decision. That sadness pales beside her rage.

When he told me he had been watching C-Span yesterday and today, I knew I was fighting a losing battle because he hadn't even waited for the final vote. Still, I tried my best to persuade him to, at least, delay his decision, remain in school the rest of the term. We can change things, I said. We can turn this around. I concede that I wasn’t all that convincing even to myself.